Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (11 page)

‘No,
nuffink like that. Like I say, just that feeling.’

‘Would
you recognise him if you saw him again?’

Mrs
Brownlie hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ she answered, clearly not liking the implication of
a further police encounter. ‘Yeah, I reckon. I can fix him in me mind, yeah.’

‘You’ve
been very helpful, Mrs Brownlie, thank you.’ Kim, smiling, put down her pocket
book and picked up her tea.

‘Look,
I’ll let you have me number. Probably best you ring, rather than come round
again. Never know who might wanna smash me windows for talking to the law.’

‘Mrs
Brownlie,’ Kim said two cups of tea later, as they took their leave, ‘many
thanks for all your help and your time. We’ll be in touch if we need you.’

‘You’ll
let me know if you find her, won’t you?’

Kim
said, ‘I’ll give you a call. And thanks again.’

‘You’re
welcome,’ Mrs Brownlie said, straight-faced, and closed the door behind them.

They
wandered a few yards down the walkway.

‘That
has to have been Edward Porter,’ Marie said, in tones that dared Kim to
disagree. ‘I just wish we’d fucking brought a photo.’

‘Lemme
tell you what this looks like to me,’ Kim said, serious, gazing at the squat
and then turning to lean over the balustrade. Marie joined her. ‘It looks like
Debbie came here looking for a bolthole. Now if that
was
Porter Mrs Brownlie talked to,
means he’s found out where Debbie was before we did. He could already’ve got to
her by now.’

‘Bloody
hell.’ Marie, frowning, reached inside her bag for a cigarette. ‘If you’re
right, God help her if he has.’

‘Let’s
go see about that warrant,’ Kim said.

Nina Tyminski
signed herself out at five and went quickly down to the locker room. Her turn
on obbo again tonight, and by rights she should be home changing, eating and,
if possible, catching an hour or two’s sleep. But the prospect held no appeal.
Too many things at home depressed her just now and the Job could be depressing
enough on its own without that, thank you. Twenty minutes freshening up, then
she’d go down to the canteen or Wagamama or somewhere for a bite and be back by
seven to drive over to Ballards Way.

Sooner
or later, though, something would have to be done about home.

Nina
had met Paul Jackson three years ago when they’d both been working at West End
Central, she on the Soho Vice Squad and he as a CID clerk. At the time he’d
been engaged to a woman who worked for Westminster City Council, but that
hadn’t stopped him and Nina hitting it off and falling in love. He’d broken off
his engagement, then in due course he’d proposed to Nina and she’d accepted.
Shortly before their marriage, Paul had quit his job for a highly paid sales
position from which, the idea was, he could put himself and Nina on a solid
enough footing to afford the mortgage on a house large enough to fill with the
host of children they dreamed of having. Unfortunately, Paul thought tact was
what you did to a piece of paper in order to make it stick to a wall. This
misconception got him fired within two weeks for casting fluently Anglo-Saxon
doubts on the masculinity of the area sales manager after being blamed for the
fall through of a vital deal. Nina had gone along with his side of the story,
and given him the full support she believed to be her wifely duty and
prerogative. But this had all happened over a year ago. Paul, in the
intervening time, had managed to land a temporary job in a department store
over Christmas - and that had been it. Nina’s patience was wearing thin. The
entirety of their marriage to date had been spent living at her parents’ house.
Mr and Mrs Tyminski, in the best Catholic extended family traditions, had
welcomed their daughter and new son-in-law with open arms. But the arrangement
had serious disadvantages. Lack of space, for one; the guilt of imposing, for
another. All this while their sex life, pursued in the uncomfortable knowledge
that Nina’s parents were the thickness of a wall away, suffered chronic damage
that might never heal.

Now
it was turning into a race against time. The Tyminskis were used to having the
couple as part of the household; the problem, more and more, would be how to
sever that bond painlessly. The infuriating thing was that Paul simply did not
seem to appreciate the urgency.

Of
course, he’d promised her a place of their own - when they had the money. Nina
was seriously wondering whether that promise would ever be fulfilled. She cast
sidelong glances at - as it seemed to her - the palatial comforts of Sandra and
Neil Jones’s maisonette, contemporaries enjoying a lifestyle that should also be
her
right -
hers and Paul’s. But however much she badgered and nagged him, he still could
not land a job. The manner of his leaving his previous employment hadn’t
helped, but surely
someone
ought to employ him.

And
then just lately, the worrying behaviour changes. Little things. Like that
business the other night when she’d got back from obbo. Staying out until all
hours. The steady disappearance of sex from their relationship, which, even
considering... Apart from his shocking sense of timing on Wednesday night, he
hadn’t touched her for more than a month.

He
was slipping away from her. However maddening he’d become, she still loved him;
loved him so much it hurt. But this couldn’t go on.

The
locker room was empty. The relief change had happened an hour ago, and the
civil staff and most of the CID were on their way home. Nina walked past the
lockers and through the door that led to the toilets and showers. She entered a
cubicle, lowered the seat cover and sat down, sliding forward until she was
perched on the edge. She leaned back, hands on her lap, sighing deeply,
switching her mind back to the events of the day, looking for things she might
have missed about the rapist who was out there somewhere.

They’d
divided into two pairs. Jasmin and Jeff had started following up the Cole and
Harkness cases. They’d left the office in the early afternoon, one bound for
Epsom and the other for Ealing, in search of officers who might hold in their
memories or notes some clue to the identity of a dangerous sex criminal. Nina
and Lucky had done the donkey work, logging the faxes and emails, the phone
calls and voice messages flooding back from all over the Met in response to the
APB. It had been a mind-numbing task. Lucky, to her credit, had stuck at it
diligently, head down, not stirring except to head off to the kettle when Nina
suggested it might be time for more tea. Nina was now feeling a bit guilty
about that. But it had paid off. Another five possibles, all south of the
Thames, all unsolved, and all involving attacks by an intruder in the victim’s
home. Already they’d made some calls whose results seemed to strengthen the
connection.

A
queasy feeling made her look down. With a sense of unreality she realised she’d
been masturbating. Her mind having found something to occupy it, meanwhile so
had her body. Quickly she brought herself off, then sat back, feeling herself
relax, muscle by weary muscle. It had yielded as much sexual gratification as a
saucepan full of cold mashed turnips and there were probably better ways of
dealing with stress, but she didn’t have time for them and this way at least
provided an outlet for some of her frustration. It made her ashamed when she
thought about it, but it was survival. The alternative was to let it all mount
up until she snapped, and she’d lost enough already without her marbles going
as well.

She
lifted the seat cover, peed, left the cubicle and went back to her locker where
she took off her clothes and hung them up. Carrying a towel through to the
showers, her pale reflection in a mirror caught her eye. Not for the first
time, she wondered if her body could be the cause of Paul’s remoteness. There
were, she fancied, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, the beginnings of
a spare tyre about her middle. She ran her hands upwards and cupped her small
breasts in her palms. She had no wish to age into a fat Slavic
babushka
; even so, she envied what she
saw as luckier women. Jasmin Winter, for example, whose neat, proud but
manageable bust looked great under any clothing and who insisted blithely that
it was just a matter of finding the right bra. Nina’s, by contrast, all but
disappeared the moment she got dressed. If she had to put on weight, for pity’s
sake, why couldn’t it be
there
?

Showers
constituted one of the perks of working in a large modern police station. She
stood, lathering herself, rinsing off, until the water ran cold and the grime
of the day was washed away, and she felt clean and fresh ready for obbo. You
learned to find alternatives to sleep in the Job, and a long hot shower was
often a good substitute when it came to recharging batteries.

She
dried, dressed and gathered her things. She was unaware she was crying until
her hand was pulling open the door, when she realised she couldn’t see what she
was doing for the tears.

Outside
she collided with Lucky. Just behind Lucky was Jeff Wetherby, returned from
Ealing, on a similar mission to the men’s locker room next door.

‘You
OK?’ He frowned at her.

‘I’m
fine,’ she snapped. He recoiled. She succeeded with a struggle in keeping the
tremor out of her voice, the desolation she felt from reaching him.

They watched her
receding down the corridor, her strange scampering walk even more conspicuous
from behind.

‘Now
what was all that about?’

‘Who
cares?’ Lucky smiled, fleetingly.

Jeff
was left staring at the ladies’ locker room door.

Hackney’s chief
superintendent was away at a conference, and it took Kim and Marie some time to
track down a subordinate willing to authorize the search warrant. The
subordinate wouldn’t sign anything without talking to Sophia first, and Sophia
had disappeared into a meeting, so it was late afternoon by the time they
entered the flat by the same means the squatters had used, knocking out the
boarded-up front door to get at the Yale lock. The door opened, and they
stepped into the dark hallway.

‘Poo!’
Marie said, gagging. ‘Somebody forgot to flush the bog before leaving.’

Kim
switched on the hall light, took a few tentative steps and said, ‘Right, we’ll
start with the obvious. Looks like there’s two bedrooms; how about I take a
look at them while you do the front room and the kitchen?’

Marie
pushed open a door with her fingertips and peered inside. She grimaced. ‘You
got x-ray vision or what?’

But
Kim had already disappeared.

The
front room was a tip. Cardboard boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, jostling
for floor space with furniture upholstered in 1970s curry powder yellow.
Washing up, fast food packaging, lager cans, dirty androgynous clothing and
piles of old newspapers and magazines lay everywhere. Marie fished out a bra
from under a settee. So there
had
been a woman here. She examined it. 36B. She wished
they’d checked the contents of Debbie’s underwear drawer more closely when
they’d searched her room. Still, from the description it sounded like her size.
‘Wish it was mine,’ she said wistfully, out loud.

‘What?’
Kim’s voice, from the doorway.

‘Oh,
nothing.’ She turned. Kim was half in the room, arms folded. She looked grim.

‘Found
something?’

‘You
could say that,’ Kim said. ‘Come and look at this.’

Marie
followed her into the main bedroom. There was no need for Kim to point out what
she wanted her to see. In contrast to the front room, the only furniture was a
pine double bed, with slatted head and footboards. It was relatively new,
possibly secondhand. It wasn’t important. The writing on the wall above it was.
Dark red capitals a foot high, dried rivulets running down behind the
headboard. They might have been blood, more likely red paint. Whatever the
medium, the effect was the same.

The
message read:

RACE TRAITOR

NIGGER
LOVER

(THRALL)

The CSI was
Vietnamese, mid-thirties, with lingering acne and glasses that didn’t suit her.
Her face behind them was defensive as she stood up and looked at Sophia Beadle.
She said, ‘Yep. It’s blood. Don’t ask me if it’s human; can’t tell that in the
field. Could be from a cut of raw steak for all we know at this point.’

She
was referring not to the writing on the wall but to a small reddish-brown
streak on the mattress. The graffiti, from its chemical smell and from paintbrush
bristles left behind in the daubing, had been confirmed as red gloss.

Sophia
nodded. ‘Get a sample over to Lambeth. Mark it urgent. If it is human and it’s
Debbie Clarke’s, I want to know quickly.’

The
CSI glared at her, affronted. ‘Was about to,’ she said, and returned to her
work.

Sophia
turned to Kim. ‘Right. What else?’

‘Looks
bad,’ Kim said. ‘I mean, she’s on the run, right? All she had on her was the
clothes she was wearing.’